Is there a workaround for the CarPlay Folder navigation bug? (For album organization)

[pheriwinkle]

What I was hoping to do way to create a structure like this to organize albums:

Genre 1 -> Artist 1 -> Album 1 as playlist

                                 -> Album 2 as playlist

What happens is when you click on the the playlist folder Genre 1 and then playlist folder "Artist 1", Spotify in CarPlay just starts playing music from the sum total of playlists within folder Artist 1 and you aren't even presented with the list of playlists that represent their albums. So--I have to "cheat" and use my phone instead of CarPlay to get an album started in the car using this organization method.

Is there a suggested workaround or other creative way to work with and organize albums hierarchically that will work in a car with CarPlay?  (Library -> Albums is not really satisfactory to manage lots of albums.)

Apparently, this is common since other people are reporting it.  Hopefully a screen recording won't be required and I've explained it properly.

Plan - Premium, Country- USA

Device (iPhone SE2, iOS 15.1, Subaru 2017)  Latest versions of everything.

[Ver]

Hey @pheriwinkle,

Thanks for posting here.

Could you please share with us the following so we can have a better overview of what's happening? We'll look into this further.

• Video or screen recording of what you're seeing.
• The exact Spotify version that is running on your device.
• The troubleshooting steps you've tried so far.
• When did this start happening?

Keep us posted.

[pheriwinkle]

Version:  8.6.80.1180 on iOS 15.1

Videos:  attached.

It's been happening a few weeks... prior to that I had never tried this method of folder organization.  Only troubleshooting is trying with multiple folders.

I've attached two videos:  one navigating the folder structure in CarPlay and the other on my iPhone.  You can see that on my iPhone, I can click through:

Country Artists folder -> Brad Paisley folder -> Who Needs Pictures playlist

Whereas on CarPlay I click through:

Country Artists folder -> Brad Paisley folder -> then music starts playing (Bug, fault)

[Kiril]

Hey @pheriwinkle,

Thanks for your swift reply and the attached info!

We understand where you coming from, however we believe that there are still some limitations to the CarPlay functionality compared to using the native apps. We can suggest couple of more things that could be tried instead:

1. Play directly by selecting the artist. This will play all Brad Paisley discography. Works best with Shuffle.
2. Add the Brad Paisley albums you like to your library and play from the albums.
3. Create a playlist that includes all tracks from all albums of Brad Paisley. This will again play all their songs. This is easily accomplished on pc/mac, as you can right-click an album and select Add to Playlist.

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted if you have any questions.

[pheriwinkle]

Hi there,

Thanks for the workaround, but none of those is really acceptable.  I want to listen to one album at a time.  Only one of those suggestions works for that, but using the library makes it too hard to find an album while I am driving a car, because there are just too many albums in the library.

Is it on the roadmap to fix this problem in CarPlay?  Or, should I write directly to support, which is really hard to find?

Thanks,

Kevin

[Eni]

Hey @pheriwinkle, 

Thanks for your reply. 

In this case, we suggest that you take a look in our Idea Exchange to see if someone else has already made a similar suggestion. If there isn't one, you can give these steps a go and submit your idea so that other users can also support it. The higher the number of votes an idea gets, the more likely it is for it to be implemented.

Also, you can read more about how your feedback reaches Spotify here.

If you need a hand with anything else, just let us know 🙂